Hitherto literature in the area of luxury and luxury brands predominantly applies a
management-oriented view of luxury. This project departs from traditional views on
luxury by focusing on consumers’ experiences with what they perceive as luxury. More
specifically, the objective is to enhance understanding regarding how luxury experiences
contribute to consumers’ selves. The empirical study is exploratory in nature and relies
on consumer diaries regarding consumer luxury experiences. This project contributes to
existing literature by outlining four different forms of how luxury relates to consumers’
selves.

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Managers’ mindset about the sustainability construct and its triggers is the topic dealt with in the paper. The interviewed managers are all working in companies expressing a commitment on sustainability in their external communication. However, our findings reveal that their commitment is pursued from different business models, visions and ideas about the sustainability construct. We found that sustainability is not triggered, approached and practiced in accordance with one overall mindset. Four interrelated mindsets emerged - due to that sustainability is a learning process and thus formed and developed over time.

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Cities increasingly brand themselves as an attractive place for tourists, investors, business and workforce. Yet, most place branding efforts do not take the diversity of their stakeholders and the variety of place perceptions into account. Our study, however, reveals significant discrepancies between internal and external stakeholders’ mental representations of a place brand, using the city of Hamburg as an example. We therefore argue that place brand management needs to align its brand communication with stakeholders’ interests, using an integrated approach to developing city-specific strategies for building target group-specific place brand architecture.

The role of marketing within companies and organisations has been discussed for a long time,
as well as its opportunities for influence – not least in times of financial constraints and
difficult economic contexts. Through in-depth interviews we investigated how nine Danish
top executives see the marketing department’s potential for influence within companies in
general and in their specific organisations. The objective was to gain deep insight into the
informants’ experiences with marketing and its position within Danish companies and to
relate this insight to the level of market orientation. We found strong similarities with other
research into the antecedents of marketing’s influence and established another key factor,
namely employee competencies and thereby the responsibility of human resource
management as well as a cultural moderator, namely creativity bias of marketing employees.

This paper presents evidence for shared insight moments in real world design processes in the context of product development for a large international medical appliance manufacturer. The findings are discussed related to the existing literature of insight in creative processes and regarding possible explanations from analoguous fields of interest, like brainstorming and multiple discovery.

Relational norms provide behavioural guidelines for individual actors interacting in business relationships. Frequently, norms are violated and the involved actors initiate a normalization process to restore exchange order. However, in rare instances violations occur with a severity where the exchange cannot be normalized by the means available in the interpersonal relationship. Furthermore, dissolution is not an option due to high perceived dependence. In this paper, we report on an investigation of three such severe norm violation episodes. We identify the violated norm sets and violating behaviours of core actors along with emotional reactions and effects on the business exchange. In addition, we map the processes of violation and normalization. We find evidence of serial norm violations, causing the interpersonal relationship to enter a state of suspension. Furthermore, cross case analysis shows that exchange was normalised through an organizational level process of alternative actor channel activation and executive intervention.

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In the past decades tourism has grown rapidly in connection with globalization. Business tourism especially has increased heavily and represents one of the largest and fastest growing sectors within the tourism sphere (Lyck 2012:2).
Alongside, the growing globalization and consumption have created a need for an increased awareness of the threats posed by an overuse of non-renewable resources. Subsequently, the concept of sustainability has come into focus.
A commonly accepted definition of sustainability was made by the Brundtland Commission in 1987: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987:43). The concept of sustainability is often associated with the three pillars: Environment, society and economy (Lyck 2012:1, Weaver & Lawton 2006). In relation to the industry of tourism, sustainability can be described as: Sustainability principles refer to the environmental, economic and socio-cultural aspects of tourism development, and a suitable balance must be established between these three dimensions to guarantee long-term sustainability. (UNWTO, Lyck 2012:1). The focus in this article will be on how to
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establish social and environmental sustainability in a way that is compatible with economical sustainability within the meetings industry.

Buying behaviour theory goes back to the start of the 50’s and over the years different models have been developed influenced by different sociological views and trends. In the age of digitalization and e-commerce these theories seem to be less useful and need revision. In the early days of the Web, research argues for a broader view on the complex decision process (Bettman et al., 1998; Hansen, 2005) and regards consumers having constructive decision processes. In the light of on-line sale additional perspectives on decision-models are still needed and recent research emphasizes the important in studying relations between human visual attention and intention to purchase (Clement, 2013).
Several companies have found an additional market place on-line, whereas the appearance of the products is often very similar to the physical shop. This goes especially for pharmaceutical products, where pictures of the product package together with pictures of the pills are used as eye-catcher on-line. The market for e-health is increasing (Usher and Skinner, 2010) and distribution of consumers purchasing on-line health products looks similar to the distribution in average populations. As the on-line drug store goes across culture and national borders it also challenges marketer to make the right set-up for a web-shop. In this paper customers’ visual attention during search for drugs on-line is investigated, relating visual attention and evaluation to a particular web-design.

This paper explores the interplay between value creation and appropriation of value by firms within a business network context. These two value processes are inter-linked. Collectively firms create a product of value to an end consumer and a part of that value is appropriated by each firm in the network. Value appropriation is composed of a number of different negotiation processes, value and cost moving between exchange parties and price making and taking spread across time. Value appropriation is a process.
Value appropriation is important to a firm’s survival. Firms that appropriate a greater proportion of the value captured by the network, relative to their resource base and costs, will be more profitable. These firms are able to invest in new technologies, resources and business relationships to continually develop their network positions.
Value creation in a business network is a result of individual firm efforts, either independently or in relationships. Equally, firms work alone and in groups to appropriate value. Understanding the dynamics and linkages between value creation and appropriation allows a better understanding of how value is created by business firms and by value nets.
In the final sections of the paper we present propositions for further research and make recommendations for managers.

In step with an increasingly knowledge-based competition firms increases their innovation activities. For this purpose integration, of external inputs from management consultants increasingly comes fore. However, the value of management consultants in general and to innovation processes in particular has been challenged. From some perspectives, management consultants are being criticized as dressing up mundane truths in fancy concepts and doing nothing but telling customers what they already know. The purpose of this paper is to try to understand the value of management consultancy from a sensemaking perspective, using a case study of concept development processes in a leading European Kitchen manufacturer. As will be showed, redressing what customers already know may in fact comprise a valuable input for their clients’ ability to identify a conception of reality which entails an actionable conception of reality.

compete strongly with each other for attracting tourists, investors,
companies, or talents. Place marketers therefore focus more and more on establishing the city
as a brand and to promote their city to its different target groups. But the perception of a city
(brand) can differ dramatically between those groups. Thus, place branding research should
emphasize much more the city brand perceptions of the different target groups and develop
strategies for cities on how to build an advantageous place brand architecture vis-à-vis its
stakeholders.
In this regards, we show in two empirical studies – 40 qualitative in-depth-interviews (Study
1) and an online qualitative open-ended-question survey with 334 participants (Study 2) – using
network analysis the important discrepancies between the city brand perceptions in the mental
representation of different target groups for the example of the city of Hamburg. Furthermore,
practical implications for place marketers are discussed.